> Schmidtlein has derided the excerpts as cherry-picked and “out of context.”
"out of context" is the standard BS answer to anything. "What context, exactly, is missing?" should be the followup question.
Odd that they don't mention that Sridhar Ramaswamy is not merely the "founder of Neeva" but he was head of Google AdWords for almost 10 years! I guess you can't expect these reporters to read their own site.
> "out of context" is the standard BS answer to anything. "What context, exactly, is missing?" should be the followup question.
Quoting things out of context is also the standard BS way to smear someone. In any case, i agree that the person asking the questions should expect this response. If they're prepared for that response and the quote really wasn't taken out of context, it shouldn't be too hard to make the person using it look like an idiot.
The problem with all of this is that it's a performance.
Google does something actually anti-competitive, but it's subtle and requires a thorough understanding of industry dynamics to fully understand. But one of their employees said something that sounds bad, so guess what the headline is.
Whether the quote was taken out of context or not isn't even the interesting question, because it's independent of whether they're actually doing something wrong.
The quote could be completely in context and the employee was a fool who didn't know what they were talking about, or it could be completely out of context even though they actually did the bad thing.
I would suggest that since this is a court case, the rhetorical / commentary-like (aspects of) statements made by the attorneys in court will (especially at this level) almost certainly be 'parsed out' in facts.
You're both right that this kind of language is used non-stop by people in certain roles today - especially politicians. Of course, that has always been the case in politics at any point in history I have any real knowledge about. In a courtroom, there are some real differences.
First, certain types of statements may be considered impermissible, and challenges are possible in various forms during various phases of a trial or hearing. Further, people who work in these environments tend to acquire a sort of "rhet-dar" (and a rather explicit form) that too many who don't get this kind of 'practice' every (work) day don't. And, of course, instructions can be provided to juries to disregard certain statements / evidence depending on challenges / various issues with something brought into a legal proceeding. Finally, at actual decision time, while rhetoric can influence, whether the decision is made by a judge or jury, the emphasis will be on facts, laws, interpretations of laws, etc.
Fluff rhetoric like "out of context" in an opening statement is quite empty, especially by the time a proceeding is wrapping up. Always makes a good sound bite for the external world though.
I can't personally be much more specific since my own legal experiences (of various types) have been ad hoc and infrequent. I considered pursuing a degree several times, never did. In particular, anyone reading would be right to not consider this in any way an authoritative comment. I will provide one ref though that has some pretty good additional info from what I had a chance to skim when looking for a bit more to give y'all. I'm sure there are others here far more expert than I, perhaps one will flesh things out better than I may have - but, giving at least a sense of the role that that kind of journalist-bait might play in an actual legal proceeding seemed worth something...
I don't really agree with that - I've seen plenty of things that have been taken out of context, and portrayed actions in a really false light. It's really not hard to take some off the cuff email or Slack remark and present it as something like official company policy.
More importantly, though, I think anything a company says internally should be 100% irrelevant in an antitrust case. It's like the famous advice parents should give their kids when it comes to relationships: "Just ignore everything a potential partner says, and only focus on what they do."
I mean, it's not like corporations need to have any sort of "mens rea" to be found a monopoly abuser. IMO all that should be evaluated are the actual actions a corporation took to stifle competition. I don't really see why internal communications are relevant at all in these trials.
> I've seen plenty of things that have been taken out of context, and portrayed actions in a really false light
And in those situations, the answer to "What context, exactly, is missing?" would be exculpatory. If it is out of context, the context would demonstrate that. If it's as damning as it seems, then "you're taking that out of context" will be demonstrated to be BS when context is provided.
> "out of context" is the standard BS answer to anything.
You are completely wrong on this one. People routinely take things out of context on purpose to defame others. Thats so common I am surprised you can make the opposite claim.
I have to say I'm disappointed with the focus on defaults here. Defaults are important, but they're also mostly a bidding war. It's not like Microsoft has no money.
The real issue is the tying. They build this conglomerated system that all comes together as one blob, and get third parties to depend on various parts of it to prevent them from being swapped out individually. Then to replace one of them you have to be able to replace the others, which makes it very hard for any but the largest corporations to compete.
Capturing the search default on Android is a tiny piece of what they do with it, and the part that would barely make any difference to the search market when the alternative would be that they just pay for it. Or let people choose them, since that's the market where they have the strongest brand and it's all the ancillary markets that they might not have dominated where the consequences are greater.
And then they wouldn't have to deal with this:
> The question that matters most, though, is whether Judge Mehta can be convinced that consumer harm applies to free products like search engines.
Because they could get them for the 30% cut on Google Play.
Advertising isn't a dissimilar tack when you cast the advertiser as the customer, but then you're stuck trying to prove that Google wouldn't have had a dominant search engine without doing this, when they had one before doing this.
> They build this conglomerated system that all comes together as one blob, and get third parties to depend on various parts of it to prevent them from being swapped out individually. Then to replace one of them you have to be able to replace the others, which makes it very hard for any but the largest corporations to compete.
The case doesn't focus on this because it's not illegal. There are definite benefits to the user in terms of convenience here. And building a product that people want more is not anti-competitive behavior just because it requires a larger company to compete. Anti-competitive behavior is when you get customers by means other than building a product they want more.
The entire point is that it isn't something the customer wants more, but they get stuck with it because they need a subset of it and it's all glued together.
This is quite distinct from providing two products together. You can go to the store and buy an entire PC with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Edge. Then you can install Firefox on it, or remove Windows entirely and install Linux. The trouble comes when you can't separate them anymore.
Then in order for a competitor, and therefore the customer, to replace the banana the customer wants to replace, and which would otherwise be easy to replace, the competing product also has to replace the gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle. Which is bad for the customer.
And tying is illegal. Typically it was in the context of a company with a dominant market position requiring you to buy products in a related market if you want the product you had to get from them, but now they're doing a new thing. Not only can you not buy them separately, you can't even separate them after you've bought them -- which should be a violation regardless of what kind of market position you had to begin with, because its primary effect is to harm competition. But this stuff is pretty much invented by judges as they go along, so who knows what they're going to do.
It’s all so ridiculous. Microsoft got nailed for talking about beating the competition. They’re trying to nail Google for training employees to not talk about beating the competition. What is competition supposed to be if it’s not beating the competition.
Just have extremely progressive taxation on companies as they get larger and stop approving megamergers if you believe large companies are harmful.
They are not being prosecuted for "training employees to not talk about beating the competition." They're being prosecuted for restrictive deals on the search engine default, which prevents competition from gaining the data they need to compete. Udi Manber himself said that's what they're for.
The training bit: personally I think it's a mistake for the government to dwell on that too much. It would be nice if they had a smoking gun email about "cutting off their oxygen," but they don't, so move on. Explaining why you don't have the smoking gun is something you should do only in passing.
I don’t think “progressive tax on companies as they get larger,” would be at all helpful. For one thing companies can skirt this with subsidiaries but also there are capital intensive industries where such a system could punish the average company. I agree they shouldn’t allow mergers, this should be very rare and there should have to be a very good case for it, but also just breaking up companies should be a lot more normal.
I also agree there has to be some kind of answer based on company profit, but I think that taxation is not the best answer. It would be much better if there was a way to funnel that money into
R&D at other companies and even industries; but admittedly I have no idea how such a system would work or if it’s even possible. Just sounds good in my head.
> What is competition supposed to be if it’s not beating the competition.
It's supposed to be fair. Microsoft didn't get nailed because they were winning, they got nailed because they were winning by abusing one monopoly to try and create another.
Bwahaha. Since when is business, or hell life in general fair?
Maybe ‘not doing illegal things’ should be the bar? At least they’re written down in advance (hopefully) instead of retroactively defined by folks who didn’t win?
About the training: Suppose GCP or Gmail accidentally steps on the toes of a user who happens to compete with Google in some other way, and during some anti-competition lawsuit/hearing, they dig up a message between employees dissing that particular competitor. Maybe things like "let's make X feature better than Y company" are fine, but it can easily slide to less innocent-looking things.
It doesn’t really seem like there’s any evidence for a story where Google went out of their way to destroy any competing search engines. The worst thing the article references is an engineer who argued that search engine quality is directly proportional to search volume, which if true would imply that making Google better necessarily implies other search engines will be worse.
Surprised there's not much coverage on this on HN. I suspect this is the first of many legal cases against the tech empires, and if this goes south you may be able to conclude the rest will as well.
How much power and influence can Google buy (absolute best attorneys, call in favors...) vs the power of the US government? If the US government can't do anything, what does that mean?
> If the US government can't do anything, what does that mean?
It means the US people would need to - if they wanted to - pass new laws specifically to target tech company's anti-competitive behaviors because they aren't exactly the same thing as what was being done by the companies the laws originally targeted.
I'm not convinced there is broad >60% popular support for expanded antitrust laws, so you'd really have to start with that in terms of what it means.
Some of us lived to see Microsoft be found to be in violation of antitrust statutes and forced to break up only for them to become the behemoth they are today. Its hard to get excited about the Google since its already been proven with enough power and influence, not too much of this matters a whole lot.
It wasn't exactly intentional but the results were great for competition. They were forced to invest in Apple and to stop bullying them, and now Microsoft is completely dominated by them in terms of personal computing.
Looks to me that Googlers reading the news of this are quite concerned about their employer being held to account for not only their monopolistic actions, but as a result of that and retaining 90% of the market share, also having virtually close to no serious competition to challenge their monopoly.
It appears that this is the beginning of the end of the big tech party.
> It appears that this is the beginning of the end of the big tech party.
I think about it differently. First, the government going after a company for being a monopoly is the goal for every company in a capitalist system. It means they won the game by cornering markets and crushing every possible competitor.
Second, breakups will grow the big tech pie and increase shareholder and employee value. How many small, but growing endeavors has a company like Google killed? How many internal projects never see the light of day because they aren't Google scale day 1? Breaking up some of the current big tech behemoths will unlock and trigger a new big tech party, it will just be spread across more different companies.
There are a lot fewer FOSS diehards and old school hackers than there were in 2001. And those that are still around are not going to be that anxious to admit that their darling Google, their ally and great hope for destroying "M$", turned out to be an even more heinous monopolist than them.
I don't think free/paid is the thing that will stop the decline because the downfall is adversarial input. If Kagi got huge people would start trying to SEO against them and they would end up like Google. Because I really don't think Google is bad because of the ads, it's bad because people desperately want their shitty site to be the first organic result rather than pay for the ad spot.
Having a huge behemoth that competitors like Kagi can fly under the radar with might be the only way for any search engine to maintain quality.
The nice thing about DDG is that you can always use !g to go to Google. But even after using them for years, I still find myself using !g 30-40% of the time.
me too. Google search result is low quality, but the overall quality of searchable text content has declined. I do most of my information search on Reddit or Youtube.
However.
Lately, I'm enjoying the integration of the generative AI at the top of the search result.
Try searching for a quote from an obscure show you watched when you were young. Not long ago Google would return pages of results. These days it's likely to return none.
I want to see Google slapped for being naughty, but this case is weak.
Defaults are defaults. What matters to users is choice. The choice is there to use a different search engine. Google widgets can be removed from phones.
Much worse is when Big Tech removes choice. Recent example: Microsoft mandating their Authenticator App as MFA, removing other options like SMS. If my workplace doesn't pay for my phone, and I don't want to install Microsoft crap on my phone, I'm in a bizarre predicament where I could be locked out of work because I refuse to install Microsoft apps on my personal device. This is wrong, much worse than "Google paid someone to be the default".
I disagree. Browsers like Chrome and Firefox have the ability to install different engines, yet I'd be shocked if Google wasn't at least 90% of the current default search engine on both browers. Most users might be technical enough to change their default, but unless Bing/DDG/et al are demonstrably better in their results, users won't switch.
Readit News
"out of context" is the standard BS answer to anything. "What context, exactly, is missing?" should be the followup question.
Odd that they don't mention that Sridhar Ramaswamy is not merely the "founder of Neeva" but he was head of Google AdWords for almost 10 years! I guess you can't expect these reporters to read their own site.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/20/23731397/neeva-search-eng...
Quoting things out of context is also the standard BS way to smear someone. In any case, i agree that the person asking the questions should expect this response. If they're prepared for that response and the quote really wasn't taken out of context, it shouldn't be too hard to make the person using it look like an idiot.
Google does something actually anti-competitive, but it's subtle and requires a thorough understanding of industry dynamics to fully understand. But one of their employees said something that sounds bad, so guess what the headline is.
Whether the quote was taken out of context or not isn't even the interesting question, because it's independent of whether they're actually doing something wrong.
The quote could be completely in context and the employee was a fool who didn't know what they were talking about, or it could be completely out of context even though they actually did the bad thing.
You're both right that this kind of language is used non-stop by people in certain roles today - especially politicians. Of course, that has always been the case in politics at any point in history I have any real knowledge about. In a courtroom, there are some real differences.
First, certain types of statements may be considered impermissible, and challenges are possible in various forms during various phases of a trial or hearing. Further, people who work in these environments tend to acquire a sort of "rhet-dar" (and a rather explicit form) that too many who don't get this kind of 'practice' every (work) day don't. And, of course, instructions can be provided to juries to disregard certain statements / evidence depending on challenges / various issues with something brought into a legal proceeding. Finally, at actual decision time, while rhetoric can influence, whether the decision is made by a judge or jury, the emphasis will be on facts, laws, interpretations of laws, etc.
Fluff rhetoric like "out of context" in an opening statement is quite empty, especially by the time a proceeding is wrapping up. Always makes a good sound bite for the external world though.
I can't personally be much more specific since my own legal experiences (of various types) have been ad hoc and infrequent. I considered pursuing a degree several times, never did. In particular, anyone reading would be right to not consider this in any way an authoritative comment. I will provide one ref though that has some pretty good additional info from what I had a chance to skim when looking for a bit more to give y'all. I'm sure there are others here far more expert than I, perhaps one will flesh things out better than I may have - but, giving at least a sense of the role that that kind of journalist-bait might play in an actual legal proceeding seemed worth something...
https://law.temple.edu/aer/2019/03/23/opening-statement-v-ar...
More importantly, though, I think anything a company says internally should be 100% irrelevant in an antitrust case. It's like the famous advice parents should give their kids when it comes to relationships: "Just ignore everything a potential partner says, and only focus on what they do."
I mean, it's not like corporations need to have any sort of "mens rea" to be found a monopoly abuser. IMO all that should be evaluated are the actual actions a corporation took to stifle competition. I don't really see why internal communications are relevant at all in these trials.
And in those situations, the answer to "What context, exactly, is missing?" would be exculpatory. If it is out of context, the context would demonstrate that. If it's as damning as it seems, then "you're taking that out of context" will be demonstrated to be BS when context is provided.
You are completely wrong on this one. People routinely take things out of context on purpose to defame others. Thats so common I am surprised you can make the opposite claim.
The real issue is the tying. They build this conglomerated system that all comes together as one blob, and get third parties to depend on various parts of it to prevent them from being swapped out individually. Then to replace one of them you have to be able to replace the others, which makes it very hard for any but the largest corporations to compete.
Capturing the search default on Android is a tiny piece of what they do with it, and the part that would barely make any difference to the search market when the alternative would be that they just pay for it. Or let people choose them, since that's the market where they have the strongest brand and it's all the ancillary markets that they might not have dominated where the consequences are greater.
And then they wouldn't have to deal with this:
> The question that matters most, though, is whether Judge Mehta can be convinced that consumer harm applies to free products like search engines.
Because they could get them for the 30% cut on Google Play.
Advertising isn't a dissimilar tack when you cast the advertiser as the customer, but then you're stuck trying to prove that Google wouldn't have had a dominant search engine without doing this, when they had one before doing this.
The case doesn't focus on this because it's not illegal. There are definite benefits to the user in terms of convenience here. And building a product that people want more is not anti-competitive behavior just because it requires a larger company to compete. Anti-competitive behavior is when you get customers by means other than building a product they want more.
This is quite distinct from providing two products together. You can go to the store and buy an entire PC with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Edge. Then you can install Firefox on it, or remove Windows entirely and install Linux. The trouble comes when you can't separate them anymore.
Then in order for a competitor, and therefore the customer, to replace the banana the customer wants to replace, and which would otherwise be easy to replace, the competing product also has to replace the gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle. Which is bad for the customer.
And tying is illegal. Typically it was in the context of a company with a dominant market position requiring you to buy products in a related market if you want the product you had to get from them, but now they're doing a new thing. Not only can you not buy them separately, you can't even separate them after you've bought them -- which should be a violation regardless of what kind of market position you had to begin with, because its primary effect is to harm competition. But this stuff is pretty much invented by judges as they go along, so who knows what they're going to do.
Deleted Comment
Just have extremely progressive taxation on companies as they get larger and stop approving megamergers if you believe large companies are harmful.
The training bit: personally I think it's a mistake for the government to dwell on that too much. It would be nice if they had a smoking gun email about "cutting off their oxygen," but they don't, so move on. Explaining why you don't have the smoking gun is something you should do only in passing.
I also agree there has to be some kind of answer based on company profit, but I think that taxation is not the best answer. It would be much better if there was a way to funnel that money into R&D at other companies and even industries; but admittedly I have no idea how such a system would work or if it’s even possible. Just sounds good in my head.
It's supposed to be fair. Microsoft didn't get nailed because they were winning, they got nailed because they were winning by abusing one monopoly to try and create another.
Maybe ‘not doing illegal things’ should be the bar? At least they’re written down in advance (hopefully) instead of retroactively defined by folks who didn’t win?
They took down Al Capone not because of the tax evasion but rather because he was a crime lord. Tax evasion was merely the means to the end.
Wrong question. How about “how can we make our product/service better”? Not, let’s just push the other company over.
Dead Comment
How much power and influence can Google buy (absolute best attorneys, call in favors...) vs the power of the US government? If the US government can't do anything, what does that mean?
It means the US people would need to - if they wanted to - pass new laws specifically to target tech company's anti-competitive behaviors because they aren't exactly the same thing as what was being done by the companies the laws originally targeted.
I'm not convinced there is broad >60% popular support for expanded antitrust laws, so you'd really have to start with that in terms of what it means.
I'm optimistic but quite jaded.
Maybe its chance or maybe it really did work, but MS is not the evil monopoly it once was. Still very succesful but not a monopoly.
Did I miss something?
It appears that this is the beginning of the end of the big tech party.
I think about it differently. First, the government going after a company for being a monopoly is the goal for every company in a capitalist system. It means they won the game by cornering markets and crushing every possible competitor.
Second, breakups will grow the big tech pie and increase shareholder and employee value. How many small, but growing endeavors has a company like Google killed? How many internal projects never see the light of day because they aren't Google scale day 1? Breaking up some of the current big tech behemoths will unlock and trigger a new big tech party, it will just be spread across more different companies.
Especially recently as with their anti-privacy policies, I would really prefer to use a different service, but they really are the best.
Recently discussed on HN is the feature to block and boost domains, which is the feature I find makes the biggest difference in their results:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37006082
Having a huge behemoth that competitors like Kagi can fly under the radar with might be the only way for any search engine to maintain quality.
However.
Lately, I'm enjoying the integration of the generative AI at the top of the search result.
Also cancerous SEO sites (with affiliate links) pop up all the time if you search for product info or comparison.
Defaults are defaults. What matters to users is choice. The choice is there to use a different search engine. Google widgets can be removed from phones.
Much worse is when Big Tech removes choice. Recent example: Microsoft mandating their Authenticator App as MFA, removing other options like SMS. If my workplace doesn't pay for my phone, and I don't want to install Microsoft crap on my phone, I'm in a bizarre predicament where I could be locked out of work because I refuse to install Microsoft apps on my personal device. This is wrong, much worse than "Google paid someone to be the default".
To my parents, double clicking on "Internet Explorer" means "opening the internet".